Does Philosophy Have to Sound Philosophical?

Using the official style in writing is a practice that has been taught in academics for a long time. Although coined by Lanham later, the official style has been exampled in writing long before.

Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher in the mid to late 1900’s. He often discussed ideology and how it works in society, expanding on Jacques Lacan’s work. One of his most famous writings is “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” an excerpt from the longer essay “On the Reproduction of Capitalism.” The essay attempts to explain the relationship between “state and subject.” The original idea was that the state operates through false consciousness, where they are able to maintain control over their subjects by creating the illusion that they are choosing their position instead of being results of the ideology of the elite. However, through reading a piece of the “Ideology” essay, not many people would come to this conclusion. And that is due to the official style.

The “Ideology” essay is written in a way that is not understandable to the masses. This is a common trend when looking at academic writing. But why?

The official style is something a lot of people have come to identify as synonymous with being smart, professional, and authoritative. Althusser is an academic and philosopher. Perhaps his use of official style is in order to attribute worth and meaning to his profession. The ideology essay was an expansion on Lacan’s work, another philosopher, and also influenced other philosophers after it was published. He writes with the same intellectual ideals that Marx, his inspiration, did. Maybe Althusser was conforming to the styles of writing that inspired him to write this essay. Maybe, the meaning behind his use of official style comes from a strange need to explain a complicated idea by using even more complicated words.

Analyzing the writing of Althusser reveals his frequent use of the official style. Commonly found in the “Ideology” text is the use of infinitives, relatives, and coordination.

The most common strategy is the use of coordination, constantly using “and”, “or”, and “but” to connect and continue ideas to increase their sentence length. There are roughly 36 instances of coordination in this small excerpt. Use of infinitives is also prevalent in Althusser’s writing including: to grasp, to take, to recognize, to break, to represent. The infinitives he uses seem to go together, grasping and raking, recognizing and representing, and then ending it all in breaking. The connection I find in the infinitives seems to point to a more deliberate use of official style, rather than this simply being the way Althusser transfers his jumbled thoughts onto paper.

Additionally, the writing exemplifies the use of long, complex sentences and extreme presence of parenthesis. For example:

“By this I mean that, even if it only appears under this name (the subject)…the category of the subject (which may function under other names: e.g., as the soul in Plato, as God, etc.) is the constitutive category of all ideology, whatever its determination (regional or class) and whatever its historical date – since ideology has no history.”

This all occurs in one sentence. It brings your brain to so many different places, having to constantly go back and forth between the parenthetical statements and the basic sentence. In trying to be clearer through explanation it becomes too much for my mind to follow. There are many more throughout the entire reading as well that follow the same convoluted sentence structure. The fact that the topic of Althusser’s writing is to analyze the influence society has on its subjects seems to constitute a necessity for it to be readable by those subjects. However, could his purpose be to write to a more specific audience with intentions of someone else being his translator? There could be so many motivations. So this continues to beg the question: why is he writing like this?

The sentences throughout the writing often sound like rambling thoughts. Sentences become so hard to read that it sounds official but unofficial at the same time. I am both impressed by the complexity but confused by the reading of it all. The longer I look at it, the more I feel like I should understand what he is saying. I think Althusser is being more deliberate in his use of official style. Patterns and constant use of strategies seem purposeful in order to sound philosophical and prove he is of high regard.

The official style has been used for centuries, even before it had an official name. There must be a meaning to it. However, I think the meaning comes from the people reading it, not from the people writing it. When Althusser is writing about ideology and ideological state apparatuses, he clearly knows what he’s talking about. But if he wrote about these topics without using identifiers of official style would we take the writing with the same amount of sophistication? He needs to write in the official style to prove he knows what he is talking about, but that is not his doing. It’s ours.

Maybe Althusser believes philosophy must sound philosophical.  He could consider the societal views of philosophy and how it is taken by the masses. If it weren’t written in official style people wouldn’t think it so important because if anyone can understand it, why is it special. The official style is certainly a type of writing that is associated with authority and intellect but also detachment and non-bias. The reason for using official style may never be definitive as it always seems so unnecessary when reading it, yet we make it necessary by valuing prestige and intelligence. But after reading Althusser’s writing about ideology and ideological state apparatuses it seems the best answer I can muster is that Althusser wants to be heard and taken seriously. He believes his writing is important and the best way to get everyone else to believe it’s as important as he does is to use the official style. Althusser knows that the people around him have linked the use of official style to authority and intellect and thus, his ideas will be highly regarded and taken seriously.

 Noelle Hausen